Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Today's entry wipes out an entire nest with one stone. With both "The Mummy's Shroud" and "Frankenstein Created Woman" I get my Hammer flick out of the way, but I also get a mummy flick AND a Frankenstein flick in there, too.

"Frankenstein Created Woman" is one of the better sequels within the Hammer Frankenstein franchise. The doctor is once again up to his strange experimentation, and this time he's playing around with soul transference. I might be off on my recollection of the plot, but I remember Frankenstein's lab assistant being framed for a murder and then being executed. The disfigured daughter of the murder victim is also in love with the lab assistant, and winds up drowning herself out of grief. Frankenstein manages to bring her back to life, but additionally he fixes her face and puts her lover's soul in her body. So, once revived, not only if she fine as hell, but she has the raging soul of her boyfriend in her ribcage, and he's craving vengeance against the upper crust dickheads who got him beheaded.

Interestingly, I had read numerous times that Playboy Playmate Susan Denberg, the woman who plays this film's "monster," had committed suicide. Apparently this is only a myth. I don't mean to sound like a morbid prick, but the knowledge that Denberg would go on to kill herself after playing a character that took her own life always gave this film a much darker feel. From her IMDb page:

After becoming immersed in the 60s high life of drugs and sex, Denberg left show business and returned to Austria. News interviews at the time show a depressed Denberg in the company of her mother, at home in Klagenfurt. These news items, repeated in fan periodicals for years, gave the impression Denberg was suicidal or had already died. Actually, she is still alive.

Either way, bitch was fine in this movie. Most probably best remember her as one of Mudd's girls on the original Star Trek. As for "The Mummy's Shroud,"I've always been intrigued by the mummy concept, and I'm a little surprise no one's done an update outside of that recent awful Universal franchise. Now a days, zombies sprint like they got breaded in angel dust. Can't we get a pissed off Pharaoh with a spring in his step? The idea of a running mummy kind of scares the shit out of me. I don't have much else to say other than I always thought that the mummy design in this particular movie was awesome looking. Otherwise, it's pretty standard fair, but nevertheless done well.